New Windows Phone 7 Chassis unveiled: MSM7X30 and MSM8x55

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Last night Microsoft’s Itsvan Cseri unveiled the new Windows Phone 7 chassis that OEM’s can use to build Windows Phone 7 handsets slated to be released in the coming months (I talked about this subject back in February before MWC but things apparently got delayed because of the Nokia partnership). As you can see in the picture above the Qualcomm MSM7X30 and MSM8X55 SoCs are now certified for WP7 (both feature the Adreno 205 GPU). A Gyroscope Sensor is now also optional for OEMs who will have the choice to use the combination of SoC, memory, gyro they want (but the overall device’s specs shouldn’t be lower than what we have with the first generation of WP7 devices). Also note the the HVGA chassis announced last year has been dropped and that WVGA is now the only screen resolution supported by WP7. As expected Qualcomm is still the only certified SoC manufacturer for Windows Phone 7 and this is in my opinion a good thing. I highly recommend you watch the full Windows Phone 7 Architecture Deep Dive session after the break:

Update: Here’s Itsvan comment from the presentation file that you can grab here.

We standardized on one display resolution – 800×480 – and we are not changing that in this release which makes application and game development easier. At the same time we allow more flexibility in the configuration of the device by allowing certain sensors to be optional.[he clearly stated that the Gyro will be optional later in the video] We are taking advantage of the latest hardware silicon vendors are producing and we are adding a new Qualcomm SoC, the 7×30 to our supported chipsets [and MSM8X55 as seen in the slide above and stated in the video below]. We have been working with them to reduce the heavy lifting they have to do writing device drivers to take advantage of all the new functionality. We will produce most of the common device driver code for the platform and the hardware vendors only need to write the very silicon specific parts